Petra Bittl – Stoneware and Porcelain, Tony Laverick – Porcelain

‘Painting on ceramics’

From 8 April to 19 May 2018 we will present ceramics by Petra Bittl (1970) from Germany and from Tony Laverick (1961) from the UK. Both active potters whom we regularly met on international potters markets and other ceramic events in The Netherlands and in Germany. Moreover, Tony Laverick participated 2 times before in an exhibition in our gallery, in 2006 and in 2015. They are both painters on ceramics. Alongside the continuous developing language of shape this gives their work an extra dimension. The stand-off you experience with artists that only make paintings does not at all exist with them. Their ceramic shapes ask to be taken in your hands, to feel the texture of the surface, to turn it over and over and thus experience a three dimensional painting and bring it to life. What they else have in common is the material porcelain that they each are using in their own way.

Petra Bittl is mostly using porcelain as an added value to her stoneware shapes (vases, bottles, containers but also free shaped vessels and tiles). She practises a decoration technique, monoprint, with which she makes a painting first on an plate of plaster, then transfers it onto the surface of her vessels. Next to it she works with scratched lines and (porcelain) slips that are applied by brush, stamps or by rubbing it into the scratched-in line patterns or with the technique of inlaying. She also works in a combination of stoneware and porcelain, for instance in bottle shapes that are basically thrown from stoneware, then at the top change into porcelain formed by hand shaping. The porcelain you will also retrieve as a slip in the painting on the surface of the pot. More recent are double walled porcelain tea bowls on which the outer wand is applied as a thin sheet, this gives the pot a very textile like look, in this line she is also developing bigger vessels and besides to that she recently also started working with strings of porcelain with which she creates transparent shapes, sometimes also double walled shapes. Subtle use of colour makes this work too become exiting too.(photos Thomas Naethe)

Tony Laverick is using just porcelain to create his vessel shapes. In the course of developing his style he has chosen to work only with black porcelain that he obtains by mixing iron oxide and manganese into the porcelain clay body. His preference for black he explains by pointing out to the richness and beauty of the glaze colours he has chosen to apply. Tony’s work is after all very colourful, his vessels show enthralling abstract compositions of painterly colour fields, sometimes plain sometimes with a downright texture sometimes in a combination with the application of metallic lustres. As a surplus Tony is a shape perfectionist, he is throwing his pots on the potters wheel rather thick, than later in a leather hard state they will be turned off till he has found the perfect balance. He states that when the form is not perfect it will not be a good pot how beautiful the decoration might be. Part of his work is double walled too and this gives these vessels a very massive character.